Camp for LGBT college student leaders

Campus Pride annually hosts a summer camp for LGBT student leaders and their campus allies. I've spoken with several students and advisors who have attended in the past, and they absolutely rave about the experience. One person told me that, by far, it was the most meaningful leadership experience she had ever had.

This summer's event will be held at Towson University near Baltimore, Maryland, July 21-26, 2009. It's five days of learning how to make your campus a safer, friendlier place for students of all sexual orientations and gender identities.

You will spend time learning about grassroots coalition building, working with faculty and staff, best practices for campus organizing. And, of course, you will make amazing friends and a network of student leaders facing similar challenges. My understanding is that this camp is appropriate for students from all types of campuses.

You can find more information at: www.campuspride.org/camp.asp

They are offering an early-bird registration fee for those who sign up by April 17. If only they had had something like this back in 1987! Wow!

Celebrate those who come...

Imagine speaking in a beautiful auditorium with 1,200 seats. In it are 1,000 students having fun, laughing, getting the message. As you conclude to rowdy applause, the student affairs staff member in charge comes up to you, and the first thing she says is, "Sorry we didn't fill the place. There were a couple groups that weren't here, and believe me, they're going to hear about it tomorrow!"

She just had 1,000 students at an educational program, and hopefully, they learned something. But, she was focused on the 200 empty seats. Instead of feeling great about the 1,000 students who came and enjoyed themselves, she made the self-defeating choice of focusing on the 200 who stayed home to play video games.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to start celebrating those who come. Stop worrying so much about those who don't.

As leaders, we naturally wish that everyone valued our efforts. We want complete and total approval of what we do, and it bugs us when we get less than 100% support. You know that you're never going to please all of the people all of the time, but yet you still beat yourself up by focusing on those who don't love you.

If you have 100 members in your group, and only 15 show up for a service event, the natural tendency is to get bent out of shape about it. 85 members blew you off, or didn't see any value in the event. Do they dislike you? Are you doing a bad job? Maybe the work you do just isn't that important to the members of your organization? You judge your entire contribution to the group based on those who didn't come.

Instead, focus on the 15 who came. Give them an excellent experience. Make it such a great experience that they go back and make the 0ther 85 wish they had come. At your next meeting, have a couple of them stand up and share their cool experiences. Thank them publicly for giving their time and their effort. Have a smile on your face and exude happiness and satisfaction.

Instead of focusing your energy negatively, focus it positively. This is a choice you make, whether you're doing it consciously or not.

Next time you do a service event, plan for 15 instead of 100. If 20 show up, even better. Celebrate those who come. The next time, you'll have 30. It just works that way. People want to do things that they identify as positive. If you're complaining and feeling negative all the time, why would anyone want to join you for an afternoon of anything?

If you're the president of a student government or an IFC, for example, stop focusing on those groups who don't value your council enough to show up. Focus on those who did make the commitment. Reward them with a valuable, interesting, fun meeting. Make them want to come back next time.

The alternative is to fine and penalize the groups who didn't show up, but that's the negative leadership route. Instead, give those who came a great experience. Commit yourself to making your meetings more meaningful, positive and interesting. Reach out to those who didn't come and let them know that they were missed. Tell them the cool things you are planning for the next meeting, ask them if they have any ideas for what they'd like to see discussed, and ask them to join to make good things happen.

Be positive. Stop killing yourself and the morale of your group by focusing on what isn't there.

I'll end by telling you a secret. Sure, I like it when there is a full auditorium full of enthusiastic audience members. But, I also really enjoy a group of 20 people who chose to be there in front of me, ready to learn something. Success isn't in the numbers. It's not about getting a certain percentage of members to show up. It's about giving people something of value and celebrating those who show up, ready to learn and be challenged. Better things happen with a small number of committed and interested people than in a room full of people simply avoiding a fine or penalty. Ask any professor. Ask any boss. Ask any preacher.

Give me those who want to be there, and I'll make them glad they came.

How to Take a Day Off

Sometimes, what you need more than anything, is a day off. Here are some tips.

• Go away. Get in your car and go somewhere. Doesn't really matter if it's 20 minutes away, or 2 hours away. Just go somewhere else.

• Turn off your cell phone. If that scares you to death, then decide three exact times that you will turn it on to check for texts or voice mails. Forget emails... if it was that crucial, they wouldn't send an email. Promise yourself you'll only respond to texts or voice messages that are legitimately critical (meaning something bad will happen unless you do). Do not log on to Facebook. Turn Twitter off. Disconnect from the matrix.

• Spend time with someone you enjoy. Talk about anything but school and your organization. It's not a day off if you spend the whole day processing every problem you have. Just give it a rest for a day. Force yourself to acknowledge the world outside of the little bubble you're living in.

• Go see someone from whom you've been feeling disconnected. Go see Grandma, or your friend at another school, or your cousin James in prison. Whatever. Spend some time in someone else's life instead of yours.

• Spend it alone, if you like. Just do something that you enjoy. Go fishing, go shopping, go visit that museum you've always wanted to check out. Eat a meal alone and enjoy the time to think. Talk to strangers and laugh a little.

• Treat yourself to something. Eat something really great. Buy the better seat in the basketball arena. Drink the expensive beer. It feels good to reward yourself now and then.

• At some moment of the day when you feel totally relaxed or happy, grab something that will help you remember the moment. Take a picture on your phone. Maybe it will bring a happy relaxing memory sometime when you really need it.

• When you return to campus, don't re-engage the matrix again, right away. Get a good night's sleep with the cell phone off. Don't answer knocks at the door. Let the peace of the day sink in.

Meet Steve Kardian - Expert on campus safety and sexual assault prevention

Top 100 Leadership Blogs

My blog was named one of the "Top 100 Leadership Blogs." How flippin' cool is that?

Here's the website that lists all of them. Check it out. Lots of good links there to other blogs dispensing advice.

From now on, I'd like to be addressed as "T.J. Sullivan, award winning blogger." (yeah, right...)

Thank you, Christina Laun (whoever you are!). I owe you a drink.

Greeks Go Bald!

No, this isn't a posting about your Greek Advisor's receding hairline. It's about a really cool philanthropic effort by students at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. I love its simplicity and its direct connection to the people it helps.

Lifted from their website:

Hundreds of students and volunteers associated with various Greek organizations at Kennesaw State University and across the southeast are coming together in solidarity with children stricken with cancer. Originally started and organized by Delta Tau Delta, Greeks Go Bald! has become an annual philanthropy event among the entire Greek community at Kennesaw. Over the next two months all volunteers and participants will raise money in an effort to reach this years event goal of $20,000 to donate to the St. Baldrick's Foundation.

Several members of local fraternities and other organizations have registered with their various teams and will begin raising money from now, until the event date. Then, on the day of the event, these brave men and women will shave their heads in solidarity with children affected by cancer.

Why I'm Hopeful (by Patton Oswalt)

Patton Oswalt is an actor and comedian. He wrote the following in the February 09 (the lastest issue) of GQ. I read it a couple of times and liked it so much, I wanted to pass it along. I think it's worth a minute of your time, particularly if you're tired of hearing about the doom and gloom of the American economy and choose instead to be hopeful about our future.

---

I think a lot of the problems we've been experiencing come from the fact that no one embraces the miracle and amazement of the present. So many people – steampunks, fundamentalists, hippies, neocons, anti-immigration advocates – feel like there was a better time to live in. They think the present is degraded, faded and drab. That our world has lost some sort of "spark" or "basic value system" that, if you so much as skim history, you'll find was never there. Even during the time of the Greeks, there were masses of people lamenting the passing of some sort of "golden age."

But I'd never go back and live in any other time that teetering on tomorrow; this is the greatest time to be alive. In the face of even more fear than we faced in 2004 -- our banks are collapsing, Al Qaeda has reconstituted itself, the weather's getting scarier and more random by the day -- we chose the smart guy. The fall of 2008 was perfect for the "Scare the Shit out of 'Em" playbook, but we ignored it and strode forward like gunfighters, armed with smarts, engagement, and optimism. It's not that I'm hopeful about any one thing. What makes me hopeful is that the soil we walk on has, for the first time in a long time, been beneficial to hope itself.